mid-year pause and reflection

Today marks the end of my first semester. We’ve conducted papers, tracked them, and seen our kids improve way beyond what Aarti or I expected. I have newfound optimism and a true sense of possibility in my kids and what they can achieve for themselves. I’m inspired by them and hopeful for them, because I know that they’re capable of pretty much anything.

There are many roles that I play as a Fellow, especially in the community in which I work. I try to be a friend and a mentor to my students. I spend hours thinking about how to discipline them in an encouraging, fair, and constructive way. I try to be, as our sex education partner says, a “trusted adult” for the majority of my kids, the person that they can turn to in cases of abuse or assault. I spend time thinking of teaching them values like respect and perseverance, because studies show that these are the qualities most conducive to long and sustained success.

But while I think that most good teachers dedicate time and energy to playing a variety of roles in classrooms and in students’ lives, I didn’t believe that this would matter. So when I tried to predict where my students would be at the end of the semester, I had a lot of hopes and dreams about their values and behavior, but few about their actual grades. I had, in short, done a better job at the soft, nonacademic parts of the job, the roles that strongly overlap with societal expectations of motherhood, than the more professional, objective, and seemingly straightforward expectations of teacherhood (yes, I just made that word up).

Going over the class’s exam results forced me to realize, though, that these roles are much more linked than I would’ve ever imagined. My kids completed their exam papers — seemingly a small feat but huge considering where they stood at the beginning of the year — at least in part just because I asked them to. Building relationships with them over the year, through home visits, football games, and just honest conversations, came through when they pushed themselves to do well.

This is going to be a long post, mostly because I’m using it as an avenue to rigorously self-evaluate what I’ve done well, what I’ve done half-assed (pardon my French), and what I still need to work on to a significant extent. Over this break, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to use the lessons I’ve learned in the first half of the year and leverage them to accelerate the growth and progress in the classroom. I’m not at all sure that I’ve successfully identified what works, but I know what I want to think did work.

First, as I’ve mentioned — building relationships with students and parents has fundamentally changed students’ expectations for themselves. Their ability to exert effort and willingness to try out new things was perhaps always there, but strong relationships have definitely created an environment that further encouraged them.

Second, I placed a strong emphasis on having my students feel successful, whether through easier tasks for some, positive narration when they accomplished something, and a lot of informal rewards systems for effort rather than achievement. This concept, of making sure that students feel successful, can honestly be summarized as my single biggest philosophy on education, and at least in my experience, had innumerable positive externalities. From increasing their work ethic to their intrinsic motivation, students from all levels in my classroom responded, sometimes drastically, to the positive feedback in a way that permanently altered my belief in my kids and their potential.

And third, I really truly care that my students not only read better, but simply read more. I think that there is limited utility in handing my students worksheets that drill specific aspects of literacy in place of giving them beautifully written, level-appropriate stories. This makes sure that the classroom isn’t the only place where they’ll read. I want my students to love to read, to wonder what the characters are thinking, to race to finish so they can see what comes next. That doesn’t come from readers or excerpts. That comes from books. Reading books in their entirety also introduces early on to the idea that in the real world, reading won’t always test inference, personification, or metaphors, one at a time. In the real world, they will have to figure out what a text is trying to say in real time, and they won’t always be deducing which strategy they’ll be using — they’ll just be doing it.

So now onto the things that I think worked partly, because I only implemented them partly, but I fully believe them to be key to sustained success in the classroom.

First, I think that a dual emphasis on high expectations and high rigor keeps students on their toes, and also forces teachers, parents, and students to expand their definition of an excellent education. High rigor classes push students higher on the Bloom’s taxonomy, pushing them to apply, evaluate, and create. High expectations show students that we know what they’re capable of, and help them rise up to achieve it. I think I nailed high rigor, but perhaps at the cost of really messaging that they were capable of doing the things I asked of them. I spent so much time saying “this is hard and you’re going to love it,” that I forgot to say “and I know you can do it.” I firmly believe, from my extra classes (which, by the way, are amazing and my favorite part of the day and just the best thing ever), that helping students feel successful, regardless of readiness, reading level, or perceived ability is one of the most important things we do as teachers.

Second, giving students responsibility over their own learning works. Depending on the student, you’ll have to adjust what responsibilities you give them, how you hold them accountable, and how you convey these newfound duties to them, but regardless, I think it’s necessary. From marking each other’s papers to holding study sessions without me to at least asking them to make study timetables for home, giving kids concrete tasks that force them to learn ownership is invaluable. I’ve learned that slowly, through small tasks that seemed time-saving rather than philosophical at the time (mark your partner’s paper because I’m busy right now, or get this answer from someone else), but now I know that systematizing these values in everyday learning has to happen.

Third, use the 5E’s. It’s a method of teaching social studies and science in an engaging and interactive way that I think is Godsend. (The two tools I swear by the most are definitely the 5E’s and Recipe for Reading). It automatically double plans, keeping in mind whether students are engaged, exploring, explained to, elaborating or being evaluated (yes. Those are the 5Es). It’s made my lectures more interactive and student-centric, which has allowed me to improve a lot in my ability to gauge student understanding. I’ve used it well, but I’ve also done a poor of job of identifying activities that would be accessible and interesting for the Explore and Elaborate sections of the lesson. Sometimes, I give them things I did in tenth grade. Sometimes, I give them things that are really a CFU and a ten second activity that only slightly breaks up the otherwise never ending teacher talk as I walk through the chapter. Hopefully, this semester will feature consistently excellent lesson plans based on the 5Es.

So now to the things that I really failed at — things that I’ve made it my personal goal to improve upon so that I can truly be a successful fellow. Teach for India calls them my “areas of development,” but I really think of them as, well, failures.

First, while I have definitely tried to cut down on “teacher talk,” I still spend too much of my time explaining the material or writing it on the board for the students to write down. I need to achieve a better balance so that my students feel like they are actively participating in every class that I teach. I think I’ve mastered that in my extra classes, after school, but I really struggle with this in class.

Second, I really need to keep the promises I make to my students. That means that if I say I’ll come to their home, I will. If I give them a test, I’ll mark it within 48 hours. If I mention an idea in class, I’ll follow through on the kids who seemed interested. This has consistently been a goal of mine for the year and I have equally consistently failed. There are small pockets of success enveloped by plentiful examples when I’ve broken a student’s trust or disappointed someone.

Thirdly, I want to better embrace and act on the idea of “many-to-many.” At Institute, we were taught that this concept is the epitome of 21st century leadership, that as a result of growing technology and ease of collaboration, impact is best achieved when we can invest others to work towards our vision. And I’ll be the first to admit that investing other stakeholders is not my strongsuit. Well, stakeholders other than my kids, anyway. Fellows, teachers, and parents are put off by many things, first and foremost by my accent and complete uselessness with Hindi. I need to either try harder to speak Hindi or do a better job of compensating for it, because there’s a limit to my impact on my students if I can’t get everyone else onboard as well.

Fourth, I truly viscerally hate the SSC. I think it promotes rote memorization over any semblance of understanding the material, I don’t think it helps students comprehend the significance or utility of what they’re learning, and I think it does at best, mere lip service to the subjects it purports to teach. In case this was unclear, this is not a healthy attitude towards the curriculum I am charged with imparting on my students. I need to find a more productive way of thinking about it, either by revising it so that I can cover the objectives it puts forth while simultaneously moving up on Blooms a year, or just simply put the requirements of my classroom in the immediate term over my philosophizing of education/curricula.

And finally, I should really push myself much harder to help my students identify their own strengths and goals and work towards achieving them, rather than imposing the values of my own education upon them. I think I do this to some extent, but I definitely have a hierarchy of goals and means to achieve them in my head, that have limited relevance to my students’ lives. That being said, I should also do the legwork required to make my own ambitious dreams a reality, so that kids have real options in front of them, rather than being on a conveyer belt to mediocrity.

I wanted to use this medium (:P) to really think through the things I need to work on, so that I could really expand my impact during my second semester. But while it’s been sitting in draft zone, my semester is now two weeks in, and I feel less successful, not more. I hope I’ll be able to address the failures that I initially identified and leverage them to better target the problems in my classroom. But let’s see.